Turns Out VR Porn Makes It Harder to Get Hard

One thing I've always thought to myself, on the, um, rare occasions that I've gone online to view pornography, is: I wish there were a way for this to feel somehow even more awkward and removed from the actual experience of human sexuality than it already does.

Good news, then, because the latest example of the symbiotic, longstanding relationship between pornography and technology makes just that effect possible with the recently launched partnership between the virtual reality film studio BadoinkVR and contemporary king of the porn mountain, Pornhub.

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Starting this week, Pornhub's VR channel (NSFW) is releasing videos specifically for viewing with an Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, or similar VR headset.

"At Pornhub it is our duty to provide our global audience with the latest in cutting edge technology," Corey Price, Vice President of Pornhub said in a statement. "Now, our users are not only able to view our content, but be protagonists in the experience and interact with their favorite porn stars and users' wildest fantasies will come alive as they slip into a world of heightened titillation."

That sounds great in theory, but so far the long-promised lotion-fisted utopia of VR sex-on-demand isn't quite here.

The conceit of pornography has long been one of fantasy wish fulfillment. Of course, the most significant innovation has come via the point-of-view style, making it easier for viewers to imagine themselves as the priapic hero. But after playing around with some of the videos for a while, for research purposes mind you, it's had the exact opposite effect on me. Certainly there are interesting options, like being able to zoom in or out, or rotate your view for a wider, all-encompassing angle of the sets for such captivating narratives as Three-Course Meal, One Stroke At A Time, and Cumming Full Circle. But if anything, the experience, at least so far, somehow makes it harder to suspend disbelief. In the immortal words of one Jackie Treehorn, people forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone. True enough, but it's hard to let your brain do the heavy lifting of arousal when you're wearing the equivalent of a football helmet with the logo of the Bedroom Wankers plastered across the side.

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Instead of being able to lose myself in the action, I found myself thinking about literally anything else besides sex (the ceilings, chiefly). Oh wow, I can look at the ceiling in this porno, I kept thinking. You never really get a close look at the ceilings in porn. I wonder how much square footage this room is? And what's it like to clean up after a shoot like that? It's like the running monologue you might expect to have laying on your back in the middle of an IRL rather boring sexual encounter.

Needless to say, that line of thinking doesn't exactly lend itself to stimulation—although it could help in delaying the inevitable outcome of such pursuits, like the old adage about thinking about baseball, if, for some reason, you're one of those people who doesn't want to finish up too quick even when you're alone. There has to be a sub-Reddit dedicated to that, I'm guessing.

Speaking on a panel at SXSW this month, Fabien Grey of AliceX, another site offering VR pornography, explained how it's supposed to work, and some of the potential drawbacks.

"A feeling of total immersion will hit the market, you can have this experience of being there will the model," she said. "It's scary because people can get lost in these worlds. As the screens get closer and closer to our eyes, people can dive into these worlds for hours."

I have little doubt that we will eventually get to the point where we're a world of VR-porn-obsessed zombies, nodding off, and jacking off, in a trance-like state, oblivious to the rest of the world that point is not today. That's not to say it's not coming soon. Nor, for that matter, am I after trying this thing.